Harrison Mäe

batshit bushrangers / missing quolls, 2023

HD video, audio. 9 mins 13 secs

Harrison Mäe is an emerging artist living and creating on unceded Dharawhal Land in the Macarthur region. He is currently completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at UNSW Art and Design. Mäe's practice is preoccupied with dead bandicoots, missing quolls, scraggly bush floors, and the complex histories found within the ruin and debris of Australian colonialism. Contextualising work from the perspective of a blue-collar upbringing in south-west Sydney, Harrison is fascinated with the signs and symbols used by colonial Australia to legitimize its presence on stolen Aboriginal land. Embattled bushrangers, pioneering poachers, the ghosts of dead thylacines; his practice is centered around the symbols and mythologies forged by white Australia in an effort to manufacture an identity within the landscape. Ultimately, Mäe works to understand and critique his own experience living as a white settler on stolen land.